The Johnson Society (Lichfield)

                            It is said by modern philosophers, that not only the great
                            globes of matter are thinly scattered thro’ the universe, but
                            the hardest bodies are so porous, that, if all matter were
                            compressed to perfect solidity, it might be contained in a
                                                        cube of a few feet.²

My own interest in the subject of Samuel Johnson and science developed a few years

ago during the final year of my undergraduate studies, when for my Independent Study

Module I chose to look closely at his allegorical piece The Vision of Theodore, the Hermit of Teneriffe, found in his cell.

I found an apparent scarcity of recent scholarly research exploring the historical significance of science in the evaluation of eighteenth century literature. It also became apparent that the skilful way in which pertinent scientific notions at the time were woven into the texture of the literature of the period, revealing the vibrant temper of the Age of Johnson, had clearly been overlooked.

                            The mental disease of the present generation, is impatience
                            of study, contempt of the great masters of ancient wisdom,
                            and a disposition to rely wholly upon unassisted genius and
                            natural sagacity.

                                                                  Samuel Johnson³

These words of Johnson confirm the importance he places upon primary sources when studying ‘the great masters of ancient wisdom’. And if we accept that the reader’s encounter with a primary source is a journey of individual experience as Johnson insists, then we must also recognise that better knowledge of the period will provide some signals and clues to facilitate our interpretative skills. 'Every man’s performance to be rightly estimated, must be compared with the state of the age in which he lived, and with his own particular opportunities,'  is how Johnson underlines succinctly the significance of anyone’s achievements measured against the historical milieu of the intellectual and spiritual forces that shape one’s being.⁴

A brief survey of available critical opinion reveals the tendency of Johnsonian scholars to scrutinise only favoured aspects of the eighteenth century, thus breaking the coherence of the whole. I shall argue that in order to gain deeper understanding of the potential inherent in Johnson’s writings, what is required is a critical approach which treats the text as part of a larger system where conventions of science have a significant role to play in the eighteenth-century literary tradition. Richard Schwartz’s book Samuel Johnson and the New Science, written a quarter of a century ago, still remains the only authority on the subject of Johnson’s scientific thought and his positive views of the Baconian scientific tradition, for which he provides a wealth of referential evidence. This study attempts to elucidate major features of the scientific methodologies of Bacon and Newton and explores both Johnson’s response to them and the way in which he weaves some major concepts into the texture of his works - from his factual reporting and book reviewing in literary journals through to the making of the Dictionary, to his essays, prefaces and dedications. Under close scrutiny comes the significance of Johnson’s emphasis on ‘experiment’ and ‘experience’ and his deliberate critical choice of the ‘vast’ and ‘comprehensive’ as direct reflections of the peculiarities of the Baconian and Newtonian scientific methodologies. For example, at the start of his work on the Dictionary, Johnson makes his position on the importance of theoretical and practical knowledge implicitly clear - a stand he maintained throughout his life:

                            The value of a work must be estimated by its use; it is not enough
                            that a dictionary delights the critick, unless at the same time it
                            instructs the learner; as it is to little purpose that an engine amuses
                            the philosopher by the subtlety of its mechanism, if it requires so
                            much knowledge in its application as to be of no advantage to
                            the common workman.⁵

The thesis argues that Johnson’s favoured approach to the ‘general’ and ‘universal’ comprises simplicity and abstraction from physical reality; and that his visually descriptive realisation of scientific concepts is inspired directly by Bacon’s and Newton’s ideas of science. The Adventurer 85 where Johnson recollects his attendance at a lecture on science ‘of a profound philosopher’ who had difficulty in explaining the terms ‘opacum’ and pellucidum’ is just one of many such examples. The lecturer’s reply that opacum was as one might say opake and that pellucidum signified pellucid’, betrays the signs of shallow knowledge.⁶  Furthermore, both words pertain to the Newtonian concepts of light - the former meaning dark, not transparent; the latter, signifying just the opposite - ‘clear, transparent; not opake; not dark’. One of the illustrative quotations for ‘pellucid’ in the Dictionary is from Newton’s Opticks: ‘If water be made warm in any pellucid vessel emptied of air, the water in the vacuum will bubble and boil as vehemently as it would in the open air in a vessel set upon the fire, till it conceives a much greater heat’. The discussed topic is a demonstration of the pervasive influence of the Newtonian concepts of science upon eighteenth-century thought. Selected quotations mainly from the poetry of Thomson, Mallet, Savage and Young in Chapter Two confirm further the positive impact of Newton’s methodology upon their creative imagination and it is in Lives of the English Poets where Johnson shows best his appreciation of the ingenuity of their poetic expression. Given is also evidence of Johnson’s innovative scientific thought which combines the essential elements of Bacon’s experimental philosophy with the originality of Newton’s concepts of physical reality.

The interpretative framework of this research is also derived from the body of available critical material on the subject written primarily in the first three quarters of the twentieth century by prominent literary scholars such as Richard Foster Jones, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, G S Rousseau and William Powell Jones. Adhering closely to observable facts in a specific historical context, they acknowledge the positive influence of Bacon and Newton on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers . The sixteen volume Yale edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson now available, with the exception of Lives of the English Poets, together with the new edition of his Letters (ed. Bruce Redford), provide the modern Johnsonian scholar with a standard edition of the writer’s works. Though Redford’s five volume Hyde edition of the Letters is produced in a scholarly fashion, with informative notes as well as scrupulous transcription and annotation, it cannot replace entirely the previous two editions of the Letters by Hill and Chapman. Since they also contain valuable sources in support of the diversity of Johnson’s literary expression, all three editions have been consulted. I view Johnson’s Dictionary as an effective tool, illuminating the power of his intellect, and I refer frequently thereto. Anne McDermott’s 1996 edition provides access to the text of the first (1755) and the fourth editions (1773) on CD-ROM. Without diminishing the importance of the printed editions, this electronic version of the Dictionary allows ease and speed of access to referential evidence. And adopting a critical stand which treats the infinite potential of Johnson’s deliberate stylistic expression as a powerful vehicle of his own response to theoretical and practical issues, encourages multiple readings of the sketch of the Astronomer in Rasselas and The Vision of Theodore in Chapter Three and Four of the thesis. The applied critical approach recognises the importance of the historical perspective and allows the reconstruction of the framework from which Johnson’s diverse and equally dynamic critical stand might have operated. Put forward is an innovative interpretation which fosters the linkage between the individual intellectual perception and the influence of the peculiarities of the Baconian and Newtonian tradition upon Johnson’s thought.

In The Adventurer 131, Johnson wrote:

And although he never came to write the parallel lives of Bacon and Newton in the fashion of Plutarch’s Lives as he might have intended, he often recognised their influence upon his own outlook. And since ‘experience’ is for Johnson the source and test of art, his works reveal a mind stored with an inexhaustible variety of fresh and original impressions from reality; a mind that extends beyond the narrow compass of any particular science. The contemporary reader is separated by some two hundred and fifty years from the Age of Johnson, but grounding in the major concepts of the philosophies of Bacon and Newton may help us find a coherent relation between specific scientific ideas and Johnson’s cast of mind. And a broader critical perspective may also allow us to appreciate better the divergence of ideas which engaged Johnson’s attention and which like darting beams upon inclined planes converge into a single whole - firm and vibrant, yet diffused and illusory; thus, we may respond to his literary works in a broadly similar way to the way one may assume he intended.

                            Where, then, is the wonder, that they, who see only a small part,
                            should judge erroneously of the whole? or that they, who see
                            different and dissimilar parts, should judge differently from
                            each other?⁸

From 8th to 12th July 1984, one hundred and fifty scholars gathered in Pembroke College, Oxford to commemorate the bicentenary of Samuel Johnson’s death. The dominant theme of some fifty delivered papers was ‘Johnson as man of letters, linguist and moralist’ with a marked ‘shift of emphasis from the anecdotal, filtered through Boswell or Mrs Thrale or Hawkins, to the critical reading of Johnson’s own writings’.⁹ It was a commemorative occasion as much as a contemplative one. In his address, Donald Greene recalled the words of an earlier Johnsonian scholar, George Birkbeck Hill, who in 1884 had directed a similar plea: ‘If we are to celebrate the centenary, let us begin by destroying the grotesque figure which Macaulay set up.’¹⁰

Macaulay’s Life of Johnson is a parody of Johnson’s physical and intellectual attributes that betrays his contempt for the writer. His fictitious physical creation of the ‘old philosopher, in his brown coat with the metal buttons, and the shirt which ought to be at wash’, is matched by a description of the alleged inadequacies of his intellect; this is greatly reinforced by the humiliating behavioural characterisation of Johnson as a man who is ‘thinking, puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing his meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in oceans.’¹¹ Ignoring the written evidence of Johnson’s diverse interests, Macaulay’s remarks insinuate the parasitic nature of Johnson’s mind, that is lacking all originality:

The birth of the myth of Johnson can be traced back to the biographical sketches and anecdotes, recollections and memoirs, remarks and opinions on his character together with extracts from diaries and letters by his intimate friends and acquaintances that started appearing immediately after his death. Johnson’s contemporaries were conversant with his literary works and their primary concern was the preservation and reconstruction of his life with emphasis on his incomparable conversational gift, his wit and alacrity of thought. Numerous accounts serving as memorabilia, conveniently gathered in two volumes of Johnsonian Miscellanies by George Birkbeck Hill, are considered minor contributions in comparison to the three major lives by Boswell, Hester Thrale and Hawkins¹³. They all allegedly supplied some detail from the life of the ‘Great Cham’, but their tendency to put too much stress on Johnson as a talker, as opposed to his intellectual worth as thinker and writer, is apparent.¹⁴ Boswell’s approach is compared with that of ‘a photographer of exotic animals and birds’, waiting ‘for the moment of greatest display on the part of his subject’. But on the whole, these raconteurs were contemporaries of Johnson who shared the sensibilities of the age and would have found as much appeal in his human weaknesses as in his great strengths.¹⁵

Arthur Murphy, who met Johnson and admired him greatly, found the uniqueness of his genius to be contained in the ‘fullness’ of his mind which embraced the Lockean philosophy that furnished him with ‘a round-about view of his subject’. Murphy compares Johnson’s inclination to comprehend the whole with the trendy tendency at the time of ‘many modern wits’, who are solely fired with ‘the ambition of shining in paradox’. He views the ability of Johnson to encompass the whole as a unique characteristic which together with ‘the peculiarities of his style, new combinations, sentences of unusual structure, and words derived from learned languages’, made him ‘an original thinker’.¹⁶ Murphy’s and Macaulay’s critical appraisals cannot be more different in outlook. The former, a contemporary of Johnson, is full of praise for the writer’s intellect; the latter, separated by some seventy years from his death, holds a very low opinion of him, both as a person and writer. Evidently and unavoidably the portrait of the real Johnson was fading away with the passage of time and his figure was becoming a legend created from subjective human fallibility.

I would suggest that the reason why Johnson’s literary works were losing popularity was not only because they were removed by time from the new readers; but being subjected to critical analysis from a different perspective, their original framework may have been misinterpreted. As the market was getting saturated with what was claimed to be ‘intimate’ biographical detail on Samuel Johnson, critical appraisal of his character and literary works became sadly over-dependent on it. The survey of primary sources was shunned in favour of the scrutiny of selected material of secondary nature that allowed Macaulay to claim confidently that ‘no human being who has been more than seventy years in the grave is so well known to us’.¹⁷ In his Preface to Johnson’s Chief Lives, Matthew Arnold speaks of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, as being the work of ‘a great and original man’ and praises ‘the largeness of his knowledge, the freshness, fearlessness, and strength of judgments’. Since Arnold’s comments are positive on the whole, one is at a loss to understand his choice of Macaulay; and remarks that ‘the subject [Johnson], too, was one which he [Macaulay] knew thoroughly, and for which he felt cordial sympathy’ appear to be somewhat misjudged, since neither of these sentiments can be detected in the latter’s piece.¹⁸ Guided by an opinion that betrays the signs of barely disguised contempt, Macaulay dismisses Johnson’s literary worth and from his position of a respected authority, he pronounces his uncompromising verdict with the cavil of a ruthless judge:

                What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man!
                The reputation of those writings which he probably expected
                to be immortal is every day fading; while those peculiarities of
                manner and that careless table-talk, the memory of which he
                probably thought would die with him, are likely to be
                remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any
                corner of the globe.¹⁹

The myth created by Macaulay - and perpetuated ever since - refused to die, despite the occasional attempts by Johnsonian scholars to have it demolished. What is significant is that, added to the time factor, there was a distinct change of paradigm in the nineteenth century - namely, from grasping the vast which offered a comprehensive overview of the whole to the scrutiny of the particular in its minuteness of detail. One example of the difference in critical perspective is the disparaging nineteenth-century appraisal of Johnson’s opening verses in The Vanity of Human Wishes:

                     Survey mankind, from China to Peru,

                    Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife,

                    And watch the busy scenes of crowded life; ²⁰

The lines are a sweeping poetic journey in the mind’s eye - from east to west, encompassing Asia, Europe and America. Tennyson, who liked Johnson’s ‘grave earnestness’ and thought, could not understand "Why did he not say, ‘Let observation, with extended observation, observe extensively?’" ²¹In 1785 William Shaw dryly remarked that Coleridge compared Johnson’s couplet with the opening of Dryden’s translation of Juvenal’s tenth satire, ‘Look round the Habitable World’, claiming that it was a swollen and expanded expression of these words. He referred to the first two lines as ‘mere bombast and tautology, as much as to say, "Let observation with extensive observation observe mankind extensively"’and repeated it on four other occasions ‘under the disguise of different phraseology’.²² Byron, though in admiration of the sublimity of Johnson’s poem, deemed the first two lines ‘superfluous’ and thought that Pope would have omitted the first line, starting straight with ‘Survey mankind from China to Peru!’ since the former line, ‘Let observation, with extensive view’, was heavy and useless. But otherwise, he conceded that this was a grand poem, ‘true as the 10th of Juvenal himself’. In 1822 De Quincey, in his ‘Essay on Rhetoric’, quoted the lines as a prime instance of ‘desperate tautology’, saying that: ‘Certainly Dr Johnson was the most faulty writer in this kind of inanity that ever has played tricks with language’.²³

These critical comments suggest that the nineteenth century mind was already losing the significance of ‘observation’ in the context of the extensive, the vast and the ‘infinite’. What is striking in the opening lines of Johnson’s poem is the selected elevated position from which the poet can observe and survey each scene of crowded human life. To use Johnson’s definition of ‘survey’ in the Dictionary, it is a stand that would allow one to ‘overlook; to have under the view; to view as from a higher place’. It is a prospect that permits an intellectual survey and exploration of the particular that is bounded and limited and the vast that is extensive and unrestricted. Johnson also defines ‘to observe’ as a human act ‘to find by attention, to note’, and supports it with a quotation from Locke which denotes the idea of the ‘infinite’ as an inherent human trait, stemming ‘from the power we observe in ourselves, of repeating without end our own ideas’.²⁴

It must be recognised that the tension between the particular, limited and bounded and the vast, unlimited and infinite, is ingrained in eighteenth century poetic thought. ‘Survey the whole, not seek slight faults to find Where Nature moves, and rapture warms the mind’, Pope pleaded and Thomson, Savage, Mallet and other mid-eighteenth century poets oversaw the face of Nature that gave them back the picture of the mind.²⁵ Their poetic vision was that of the wandering eye that scanned the whole, revealing the sublimity of Nature; and a picture painted from memory became a dramatic evocation of a sky arching over the earth. As readers of their poetry, we envisage ourselves sitting on invisible steps outside of the vast poetic canvas, and our senses are aroused by the colour, light and dynamics of depicted reality.

It is the authority of science that gave the mid-eighteenth century writers the courage to realise a poetic vision in which the reader is turned into a participant of their momentous impression. The publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687 with his revolutionary idea of a single law of physics embracing the whole universe, had energised human thought. Yet the realisation of the limited power of human vision and the unlimited power of the mind was never felt more acutely than after the appearance of Newton’s Opticks in 1704. ‘It is observable, that either by nature or by habit, our faculties are fitted to images of a certain extent, to which we adjust great things by division, and little things by accumulation’, Johnson observes in Rambler 208. And he hastens to acknowledge that because of the deficiency in human vision, ‘of extensive surfaces we can only take a survey, as the parts succeed one another; and the atoms we cannot perceive, till they are united into masses.’²⁶

Although it is difficult to say whether Macaulay’s view was truly representative of nineteenth century literary taste, it would be wrong to single out solely his ill-conceived judgement as the root of falsely orchestrated opinion of Johnson. He might have contributed to the writer’s unfavourable reception, but his critical perspective suggests a general shift in paradigm. In 1884, George Birkbeck Hill had put up a defence of Johnson in reply to a review in the Times in which his style was rendered obsolete since ‘he had little disposition towards abstract thinking and no lively imagination’. But both are present in Johnson’s works and this puts into question the basis upon which the prevailing view of them was formed. The new century was at a loss to grasp the reason for ‘the infatuated admiration which he inspired’ in his contemporaries. Hill refused to accept that the difference in taste should give sufficient grounds ‘so that he [Johnson] cannot be ranked high as a philosopher or poet’.²⁷ He failed to acknowledge however that the difference in taste may well have been shaped by a changing critical outlook.

At the time of Johnson’s death, a new era was breaking on the horizon, setting the scene for great strides in many key areas of scientific development. If in his day ‘science’ meant learning or knowledge, and was part of Bacon’s and Newton’s natural philosophy, in the nineteenth century, the inevitable increase of experimental and theoretical knowledge was already leading to their segregation. From the steam engine of James Watt to Thomas Young’s longitudinal waves theory of light, Lamark’s zoological philosophy and Cuvier’s fossil theory of catastrophism, to Faraday’s demonstrations on electrical forces, Schwann’s cell theory and Darwin’s theory of evolution - new discoveries were enlarging human knowledge of the workings of the universe. As various disciplines of science were becoming more narrowly defined, so was the artist’s outlook in the nineteenth century - a far cry from the vast embrace of the mid-eighteenth century poetic vision of Pope, Akenside, Addison, Thomson, Savage and Johnson.

In 1966, in his Foreword to the reprinted edition of Johnsonian Miscellanies, Walter Jackson Bate paid tribute to the achievements of Birkbeck Hill and viewed as a great success his six volume edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson that had appeared in 1887.²⁸ This major work of the Johnsonian scholar was followed by his edition of the two volumes of the Letters of Samuel Johnson in 1892 and the three volume edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, published posthumously in 1905. In the Preface to his edition of the Letters, Hill declares that he ‘shall present his readers with one of her [Mrs Thrale’s] original letters to Johnson, which will amuse them probably more than those well-written but studied epistles which she has inserted in her collection’.²⁹ One can detect a somewhat overt preoccupation with the amusement of the reader which raises the question as to whether the scholar does not deviate slightly from his serious intentions in his edition of the Letters. This may suggest to a degree Hill’s failure to grasp the potential of the letters as an important source of critical-imaginative enquiry about the cast of mind of the real Johnson in relation to the vibrant impulse of his age. However although Hill’s edition of the Letters has been superseded by R W Chapman’s of 1952 and thereafter by the five volume edition by Bruce Redford of 1993, it remains of value.³⁰ One might go further than Redford and say that the Letters are not only ‘previous biographical documents’; they are also a testimony to Johnson’s diversity of interests and the vigour of his inquiring mind.³¹ But all three editions bear the imprint of subjective selection of material and annotations.

For example, the thirteen extant letters from Johnson to Lewis Paul, spanning the period from 1741 to 1756, were concerned with the first roller spinning machine of Wyatt and Paul, and throw light upon Johnson’s fascination with the practical application of knowledge. And although they were printed by Hill, little attempt was made at the time to explain the circumstances which prompted the writing of them. In a later study of the letters, John J Brown traced the writer’s likely personal involvement with the invention which laid the foundations for modern spinning machinery.³² The letters reveal not only the difficulties with which the project was plagued, but they also affirm Johnson’s sympathetic stand and his active role as umpire in the dispute between Wyatt and Paul.³³ In 1748 Paul succeeded also in patenting the first continuous or circular carding machine, a method adopted by Richard Arkwright and still used today. It is thus not surprising that when Arkwright explained his machine to Johnson years later, he was astounded at the writer’s ‘quick apprehension of its main principle’.³⁴ If Johnson really assisted in the initial stages of the project in the 1730s in Lichfield and Birmingham, as it is suggested by Brown, he would have learned first hand of the difficulties faced by inventors - an enriching experience in its own right. Johnson’s letters to Lewis Paul reveal also the writer’s sympathetic disposition to the project and the tact and discretion with which he tried to assist in the dispute. It is worth noting also that the three letters connected with the plans for the construction of Black-Friars bridge, as well as the correspondence between Zachariah Williams and Dr Bradley and the Lords of the Admiralty, written by Johnson, are included only in Chapman’s edition of the Letters.³⁵ They should not be ignored by those who are looking for evidence of Johnson’s keen interest in, and response to, the pertinent issues of science at the time. They exemplify the persuasive power of the pen of a brilliant and determined adversary and as they provide convincing evidence to disprove the anecdotal caricature of Johnson the Philistine, they are discussed in detail in Chapter 3.

Paul Korshin, in his Introduction to Robert Anderson’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, claims that Anderson is the first biographer who is not ‘a partisan friend involved with the man’s personal reputation’ as ‘the relatively disinterested critic is primarily concerned with establishing the facts of literary history’.³⁶ He hails Anderson’s work as ‘the first full-length study of Johnson’. Korshin argues that in this much neglected study of Johnson, Anderson departs from the typical method of eighteenth century chronological surveys of bibliographical detail. In order to present a critical interpretation of the writer’s life and works, ‘he [Anderson] does not hesitate to employ conjecture or to present an analysis of an event or statement which differs from that given by Hawkins or Boswell’.³⁷ According to Korshin, Anderson is ‘declarative and conclusive’ and parts of his book can be regarded as an ‘early form of psychobiography’. Anderson himself concedes that the dilemma facing the biographer is to decide ‘what should be given to the world and what should be withheld’.³⁸ And in selecting particular events from Johnson’s life, he passes his literary judgement from the perspective of psychoanalysis.

Anderson’s shift in outlook from a chronological representation of facts, the manner favoured by ‘friend and foe, panegyrists and satirical defamers, by the lovers of anecdote, and the followers of party’, is viewed positively by Korshin. He considers him the first of the interpretive biographers, attempting an innovative critical evaluation of Johnson’s place in the literary world. The critic concedes though that Anderson’s attitude ‘falls short of the contextual humanistic approach which Samuel Parr projected but never wrote, for Anderson did not possess Parr’s learning’.³⁹ Furthermore, by probing solely into the ego of the writer, Anderson fails to examine Johnson’s lively response to external reality and his keen interest in natural philosophy remains unnoticed.⁴⁰ Indeed, the major difference between Parr’s intended critical approach and that of Anderson is that of critical perspective.⁴¹ Parr’s suggested surveillance of the whole spectrum of Johnson’s knowledge is a journey with open frontiers; that of Anderson is a self-limiting exercise within the boundaries of the purposely chosen framework of psychoanalysis. It is likely that Parr, who had conversed with Johnson on a number of occasions, was aware of the enormity of the task and decided to abandon his original intention. The methodology he had in mind would have required him to scan the whole of Johnson’s canon - from his poems and periodical essays to his book reviews on a wide range of topics from natural philosophy in the Literary Magazine; from dedications to his Scottish tour and his Welsh diary, to many other written records of his journeys round the country; from his association with the Society of Arts to his letters written on behalf of friends and acquaintances which disclose a keen interest in all areas of science, and much more. This presents a truly arduous task for anyone to undertake in search of the ‘real’ Johnson.

2 Twentieth century overview

Traveling further into the twentieth century there still appears to be a tendency amongst critics to examine Johnson’s works on the basis of fashionably coined critical notions. For example, the post-Freudian method of psychoanalysis is employed by Walter Jackson Bate in his 1979 biography of Samuel Johnson.⁴² In his Preface, Bate recognises the difficulty faced by the biographer ‘created by the radical split, which began in the 1930s and 1940s, between literary biography and literary criticism’.⁴³ He points out that, ‘a biographer of Newton will try to look closely at Newton’s actual work or a biographer of Handel or Mozart will dwell in detail on the music of the writer’ and concedes that this, after all, ‘is the reason they are great’. Critical material from the last decade of the twentieth century shows that neither Newton nor Mozart did escape the trendy scrutiny of psychoanalysis.

Bate makes a valid point that in over-emphasising one genre to the detriment of another, critics have limited their vision which is likely to distort their picture of the whole. He warns against the danger of this approach which may lead to subjective distortion of data through one’s critical attempt to apply formulas to conditions of life and character in preference to some external factors which may have been major influences on the writer’s literary works. By bringing closer ‘biography’ and ‘criticism’, Bate’s imaginative reconstruction of events in Johnson’s life is no doubt intended to make Johnson more accessible to the modern reader. But his critical perspective allows for manipulation and blurring of biographical information and the narrowing effects of psychoanalysis ignore Johnson’s resolute response to the complex currents of his day which included his interest in scientific and technological advancement. Bate’s over-reliance on the psychoanalytical approach may well be the reason why, for example, he fails to appreciate the artistic merit of Johnson’s allegorical piece The Vision of Theodore. He firmly rejects its worth, in saying that ‘except for those resolved to find transcendant merit in everything Johnson ever wrote, ‘the Vision of Theodore’ is usually read with disappointment because of the remark (which Boswell paraphrased from Bishop Percy) that Johnson once said "he thought this was the best thing he ever wrote"’.⁴⁴ Bate’s expressed doubt about the validity of Bishop Percy’s high praise of the allegory suggests that the piece failed to meet with his expectations. Nonetheless, according to Thomas Percy, Johnson ‘attributed the palm over all he ever wrote to the little allegorical piece’.⁴⁵ This assertion is qualified as ‘absurd’ by the writer who elaborates further on the possible reasons as to why Bishop Percy may have made such a remark and puts forward the argument that Johnson may have been joking ‘by making a remark of this sort’; or that indeed Johnson may have been possibly referring to his Oriental tales and allegories before he wrote Rasselas.⁴⁶

However, it is doubtful whether Johnson was joking since if his allegory on human nature were to be analysed as an ingenious application of Newton’s laws of motion, it would reveal an originality of poetic design and richness of artistic imagination. It must be remembered that in the eighteenth century physics was the science of corporeal matter in general and the study of the mind with its cognitive power and metaphysical consideration came under close scrutiny. In view of this, if put under the critical scrutiny, The Vision of Theodore, can be perceived as a truly artistic literary piece in which Johnson weaves the concepts of naked science with resourceful imagination.

In his review of Bate’s book, Frederick Troy suggests that Bate’s psychological method which appears to be ‘based upon Erik Erikson’s "paradigm" of human development’ fails to acknowledge the influence of the complex body of externally operating forces. He points to the influence of Freudian and other psychologies and remarks that biographical data, manipulated in a sterile fashion that functions outside of the context of any significant historical indicators, can lead to the creation of a profile that lacks the richness of dimensionality.⁴⁷ Admittedly, Bate’s portrait of Johnson does not have the hostile overtones of Macaulay’s grotesque image of the writer. But, his character of Johnson becomes more of a revelation of the compulsive nature of his neurotic morbidity than an explanation of the peculiar force and intensity of his genius. Bate does what he fears most. In choosing the singular critical view of psychoanalysis, he omits important external factors, connected with major scientific discoveries which shaped eighteenth-century thought and particularly influenced Johnson’s cast of mind. In this way, he fails to recognise the immediacy with which Johnson responded to the impulse of his Age and the skilful application of science in his literary works remains unnoticed.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, critics have attempted to adopt a much broader approach that allows a more complex survey of Johnson’s works against the peculiarities of the prevailing intellectual and spiritual climate of the eighteenth century. For example, in his Study of Samuel Johnson’s Attitude to the Arts of 1989, Morris Brownell tries to reverse the settled consensus of the writer’s generally negative view of the arts.⁴⁸

‘It was during the latter half of the eighteenth century that English arts came of age’, reflects Brownell, and mentions prominent initiatives such as the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768 and the first public exhibition of art, the first English art festivals in the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769 and the Handel Commemoration of 1784 - all of them contributory indicators of the keen interest towards the arts in the age of Johnson. Setting the lively currency of the state of the eighteenth-century arts in England in the period after the 1760s, he pays particular tribute to the booming London art market as ‘public architectural projects were lifted out of the doldrums with the building of Blackfriars Bridge in the 1760s and Somerset House in the 1780s’.⁴⁹ Adhering closely to the intellectual and cultural milieu of the day, Brownell confronts the myth of Johnson’s alleged insensitivity to music, his blindness to art and his ‘universal blank’ to landscape that may largely be due to our misinterpretation of the ‘anecdotal tradition’. He argues convincingly that this wrongly settled opinion ‘eclipsed his [Johnson’s] important and interesting contribution’ to the promotion of home-grown arts. Brought to the forefront is Johnson’s close connection with the Royal Academy, his friendly links with Charles Burney, Joshua Reynolds and prominent architects such as William Chambers, Robert Mylne and John Gwynn and many of the writer’s journalistic contributions.

A similar critical approach to that of Brownell is employed by Allen Reddick in The Making of Johnson’s Dictionary, 1746-1773.⁵⁰ The book is hailed as ‘a landmark study’ by Michael Suarez who praises the author’s explicitly defined view ‘that we ought to read the Dictionary as a literary and rhetorical discourse by attending to the multiple voices of the text’.⁵¹ Aware of the complexity of his task, Reddick’s study is based upon ‘years of analysis of manuscripts and textual evidence, along with whatever external evidence’ could be found. He identifies his approach as ‘critical analysis of the Dictionary as text and cultural production’, requiring much knowledge of background detail from a historical perspective.⁵² Rightly noted is the fact that during the years of toil on The Dictionary, a living testimony to Johnson’s fertility of mind, he transcended the limited boundaries of individual disciplines of learning in order to survey a whole spectrum of human knowledge. Reddick’s critical study is an open-ended inquiry, inviting ‘more empirical studies, more gathering of data, more attention to the rhetorical nature of the text’; thus, requiring wider information about the period.⁵³

Undoubtedly, Johnson’s nine painstaking years of work on the Dictionary were an enduring example of his innovative bent of mind and his ever present hunger for knowledge. But they also made him realise the enormity of the task he had undertaken. ‘When first I engaged in this work’, he declared in his role of lexicographer, ‘I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature’. However, by August 1748 the huge task of selecting some 114,000 quotations was over and their boundless variety confirms Johnson’s access to a great wealth of sources, be that in the field of science, history, philosophy or literature. When evaluating his work on the Dictionary, he said that he had ‘extracted from philosophers principles of science; from historians remarkable facts; from chymists complete processes; from divines striking exhortations; and from poets beautiful descriptions’. Furthermore, Johnson defended his decision to take examples ‘from writers who were never mentioned as masters of elegance or models of stile’, for the reason that ‘words must be sought where they are used’. And to vindicate his pragmatic choice and dispel any doubt, he asked, ‘in what pages, eminent for purity, can terms of manufacture or agriculture be found’?⁵⁴ For him, the work of the labourer was just as indispensable as that of the philosopher and he wanted to make sure that their ideas w ere equally respected in the Dictionary. Well aware of the embryonic problem with technical terminology to which he referred as ‘terms of art’, Johnson sought them ‘in books of science or technical dictionaries’, and often inserted ‘from philosophical writers words which are supported perhaps only by a single authority’. Some newly coined concepts stood ‘as candidates or probationers’ and their adoption depended on ‘the suffrage of futurity’. Thus, in the case of technical terms he used his judgment and gave them the benefit of the doubt if they were not well established.

It is evident that in his interpretation of words, Johnson attempted to provide sufficient information in order to meet the public interest in the sciences. For example, under the word ‘barometer’, instead of being satisfied with supplying some general observation of it as ‘an instrument to discover the weight of the air’, Johnson felt that ‘it would be fit to spend a few lines upon its history of invention, construction and principles’.⁵⁵ His lengthy definition of ‘barometer’, shortened for the revised edition of the Dictionary, carries considerable information about the operation of this very important instrument in the investigation of the properties of air.⁵⁶ This is part of a major work incorporating Johnson’s use of Harris’s Lexicon Technicum and Chambers’s Cyclopaedia. Hence the recognition of the lexicographer that ‘as by the cultivation of various sciences, a language is amplified, it will be more furnished with words deflected from their original sense’; and that will inevitably lead to defusion of specialised jargon into various branches of science and ordinary walks of life. In this way, ‘the geometrician will talk of a "courtier’s zenith, or the eccentrick virtue of wild hero;" and the physician of "sanguine expectations and phlegmatick delays’".⁵⁷ It is important to remember that in the age of Johnson the applied and theoretical aspects of science were mutually enriching, constantly improving, reshaping and complementing each other. And this is most eloquently expressed by Johnson in Rambler 9:

                        The philosopher may very justly be delighted with the extent

                        of his views and the artificer with the readiness of his hands;

                        but let the one remember, that, without mechanical performances,

                        refined speculation is an empty dream, and the other, that, without

                        theoretical reasoning, dexterity is little more than a brute instinct.⁵⁸

One can understand then why in Johnson’s works the reader is learning one minute about the process of pinking, gilding or making aether and the next, and another one is engaged in reflection on the philosophies of Descartes, Pascal and Locke. Thus, the Dictionary can be viewed by the Johnsonian scholar as a rich source of his searching spirit and a confirmation of the inquisitive spirit of his age.

Robert De Maria’s Johnson’s Dictionary and the Language of Learning is an earlier mid-1980s enquiry into the making of the Dictionary and is similarly innovative in its approach.⁵⁹ Since the Dictionary has remained one of Johnson’s less studied works, De Maria’s book is the first critical attempt to discuss it as a great literary work. But limiting his study to the text of the first edition of the Dictionary, De Maria discusses illustrative quotations as isolated passages, removed from their context. In this he fails to recognise the potentials of the Dictionary as a revelation of Johnson’s familiarity with pertinent scientific issues of his day, both theoretical and practical.⁶⁰ De Maria’s observation that ‘the Dictionary both reflects a certain period in the history of knowledge and ignorance’ and his concluding remark that ‘a history of knowledge that takes sufficient account of the history of ignorance is yet to be written’ are examples of his glossing over important points.⁶¹ From the restrictive premise of his determination to treat the Dictionary as a vehicle of Johnson’s particular thematic arguments, De Maria makes assumptions which he offers as definitive statements. And Johnson’s overriding criterion for his choice of illustrative quotations as clear illustrations of the uses and meanings of words remains unacknowledged. But as Johnson acknowledges in a ‘Preface to the English Dictionary’, ‘a work of this kind is not hastily to be charged with superfluities’; and he admits that ‘those quotations, which to careless or unskillful perusers appear only to repeat the same sense, will often exhibit, to a more accurate examiner, diversities of signification, or, at least, afford different shades of the same meaning’.⁶²

De Maria appears to encounter a similar problem in his more recent book of 1993, The Life of Samuel Johnson, written as an investigation of Johnson’s personal intellectual history.⁶³ ‘My object in the pages that follow’, writes De Maria, ‘is to tell the story of Johnson’s life as a compromise with his highest aspirations for a life of European scholarship and European identity’. The new tendency for producing ‘objective biography’ is translated into his attempt to ‘reinstate Johnson and his works in a European cultural context without introducing, as far as possible’ any help from Boswell.⁶⁴ De Maria’s aim to look closely at this under- researched dimension of Johnson’s ‘great desire to emulate these venerable continental authors’ can be viewed in general as a valuable contribution to the current ‘objective’ Johnsonian critical debate.⁶⁵

In scrutinising a large body of the Johnson canon, De Maria boldly ventures into an analysis of some of the writer’s neglected pieces in The Literary Magazine and his Lectures on the English Law which should encourage a more thorough reading of them. His familiarity with Renaissance humanistic thought and neo-Latin poetry allow De Maria to explore the subject at length. By framing his argument within the narrow bounds of his well-defined critical perspective, he takes great pains in making explicit Johnson’s intellectual kinship with the European humanists. But viewed solely from the perspective of Johnson’s affinity with his European intellectual forebears from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, De Maria’s attempt proves a self-limiting exercise.⁶⁶ And in his eagerness to make Samuel Johnson acceptable to the operating principles of the current canon of American scholarship, he assumes the position of ‘an American’ who, in his words, is trying ‘to liberate Johnson from England in order to place him in a cultural milieu without national boundaries and equally accessible to all his admirers’.⁶⁷ In order to create an image ‘less narrowly English and more catholic in his sensibilities and aspirations than we have previously realised’, De Maria paints a single-faceted picture of the writer.⁶⁸ But the English tradition of science and scientific ideology to which Bacon’s empirical methodology and Newton’s revolutionary ideas are central cannot be ignored when discussing the works of Johnson.

Another example of a reductive approach to Johnson’s scientific affinities, from a very different point of view, is John Wiltshire’s book, Samuel Johnson in the Medical World (1991), where he travels on his journey without help from Boswell to produce a study in which Johnson is its psychopathological doctor.⁶⁹ Speaking of Johnson as a man who ‘saw that his own dreams and ambitions had the seed of madness in them’, he explores the notion that ‘Johnson’s achievement was to conceive of the study of the insane man as a narrative of his insanity, and to depict - a part of the madman’s condition - the story he tells himself about his genius’.⁷⁰ Imbued with overtones of a post-Freudian psycho-biography, Wiltshire’s book depicts Johnson as a doctor of the mind, a self-absorbed player in his own drama. In the light of this, Johnson’s medical history, his many associations with doctors and his interest in physic, together with extracts from his literary texts are used solely as a vehicle in the double plot: the doctor-patient relationship. And whilst Wiltshire’s descriptions of Johnson’s scrofula, tics, neurasthenia, gout, cardiac congestion, emphysema, aphasia, partial blindness, melancholy and oedema may be read as medico-literary texts, they may fail to add much to the reader’s understanding of Johnson’s vibrant intellect and the multi-dimensionality of his literary spirit. For example, Johnson’s extensive reviews in the Literary Magazine include all of Stephen Hales’s articles that are concerned with the preserving of health and lives of people, from a suggested improvement in the method for the distillation of sea water to the ventilation of transport ships and the cure for the ill taste of milk.⁷¹ But more importantly, as a founding member of the Society of Arts, and recognised as ‘one of the most celebrated Englishmen of the Eighteenth century’, Hales had remained true to the spirit of the Society for the improvement of life. ‘This is another of the labours of a life spent in the service of mankind’, is how Johnson expresses his respect for Hales who had devoted major portions of his life to public duties and public service.⁷² In the Dictionary ‘ventilator’ is defined as ‘an instrument contrived by Dr Hales to supply close places with fresh air’. Apparent is Johnson’s admiration for the amateur scientist whose enquiring mind was in a ‘perpetual motion’, ‘searching new powers of nature’ and whose Vegetable Staticks of 1727 had been a pioneering study of the operations of vegetation mechanism.

Combining the rigour of Bacon’s experimental philosophy with his ingenious understanding of Newton’s theory of gravitation, Hales was the perfect example of an eighteenth-century amateur scientist. His research techniques, newly designed experiments and discoveries in pneumatic chemistry, vegetable and animal physiology were recognised by major figures of eighteenth century science from Joseph Black, Henry Cavendish and Joseph Priestley, to Lavoisier and Buffon.⁷³

A tireless enquirer into natural phenomena and a true product of the age of Newton, by measuring the amounts of water absorbed by the roots and given off by the leaves, a process which became known as ‘transpiration’, Hales collected gases with the assistance of his celebrated device, the ‘pneumatic trough’. Limiting his experiments to short periods of twelve to fifteen days, he measured the amounts of water added and noted the changes in weight of plant and pots, demonstrating the quantities imbibed and perspired by plants and trees. This showed that air supplied some thin material to the substance of plants, pointing to what we now know to be carbon dioxide. And in the hands of his successors, Hales’s finding was to be the discovery of many gases that led to a revolution in chemical theory. If viewed in this context, Johnson’s entry in the Diaries for 10 December 1777 of his findings ‘that an ounce of laurel leaves when dried lost seventeen parts in twenty four by weight’ may not be coincidental.⁷⁴ This seemingly trifling example of curiosity certainly reveals Johnson’s interest in pertinent scientific issues and confirms his view of ‘intellectual curiosity’ as being ‘one of the permanent and certain characteristicks of a vigorous intellect’.⁷⁵

Before proceeding to address the nature of Hales’s discoveries in his review, Johnson succinctly outlines the difficulty of the task that has engaged much time and attention. ‘Many attempts have before been made to find a method of making the water of the sea wholesome for the table’, remarks Johnson and having presented the importance of the problem in a single sentence, he proceeds to explain the nature of it with measured brevity and clarity of style. This is just one example, illustrating his practical bent of mind. ‘For this no kind of filtration is sufficient, for though salt-water may, by passing through some mediums, be saved from all perceptible particles of salt, yet it still retains its bitterness more nauseous than salt’. Offered then is a selected extract from Hales’s pamphlet with Johnson’s analysis of the efficacy of the ‘method of blowing air through the boiling water’ which allows for the distilled quantity to be doubled ‘in the same time’. The reviewer assesses its practical significance as a ‘great improvement’ to the existing method due to the additions of ‘some ingredient, that might combine the salt, and dispose to a more speedy separation from the water’.⁷⁶

More importantly, extracting only the essence of Hales’s discovery and submitting it to his condensed interpretation and evaluation, Johnson makes it accessible to the lay person. For Johnson, the addition of true-to-life practical applications excites curiosity and facilitates learning. Specially selected passages help the reader’s understanding of the progressive stages within the technical process and his helpful comments advance the argument since ‘tracing one consequence from another is of more importance than the distillation of ten waters’. Professing not to be speaking as an expert, but as a lay person eager to understand, Johnson questions the validity of some of the presented findings which appear fallacious to him. And ‘since ventilation adds no heat to the water, and the water must be hot before it will pass off in vapour’, he decides that ‘a double quantity of water must require near a double quantity of fuel’.⁷⁷ Johnson’s critical observation and investigative rigour exemplify the unfailing alertness of an enquirer who is keen to understand the validity of Hales’s argument in relation to the achieved efficacy in quantitative terms. His judgement as a reviewer of the nature and significance of the scientist’s work is made upon two accounts: one, the extent to which Hales succeeds in applying the concepts of attracting elastic air and ventilation to his ingenious device by which a stream of air is kept ascending through the distilling liquid; two, the relevant importance of his discovery as a contribution to the improvement of the welfare of his fellow countrymen, and made accessible to the lay person. The figure of Johnson that emerges is not one of a maniac suffering from hypochondria, but of a man keen to understand the operations of nature in scientific and practical terms.

1.3 The importance of the historical perspective

So far my survey of critical opinion on Johnson in relation to the issues of science suggests that what James Clifford and Donald Greene observed in 1970 is still true: ‘The history of Johnson’s reputation since his own lifetime is in fact complex and needs even more study than it has received’.⁷⁸ In his succinct overview of the critical approaches applied over the last two centuries, Stephen Lynn reiterates the observations of Clifford and Greene on the complexity of the task of the Johnsonian. He commends the contributions of twentieth-century Johnsonian scholars from Krutch, Clifford, Wain and Bate to Kaminski, Korshin and De Maria for adding much new details to the diversity of critical debate. In his view, these critics have tended to operate from within a critical paradigm that Johnson himself would recognize, seeking to connect the man and his work’. However, he finds the gap between the critical method of early critics who had ‘looked at Johnson’s substance, style and effects’ and that of modern critics ‘who have tried to suppress the fictional Johnson’, too big to be filled.⁷⁹ Lynn recommends a more balanced investigative technique that can be applied with equal rigour to the works of Samuel Johnson and suggests that some significant biographical and historical indicators may also bridge the existing chasm. And the end result, no doubt, is likely to be more akin to the image of the real Johnson, that of a deeply humane mind, attuned to the interests of his age.

Jack Lynch praises the ‘Clingham collection’, in which Johnsonian scholars demonstrate clearly their acceptance of the new critical perspective which, by staying close to Johnson’s writings, ‘gives us very little of the familiar Boswellian character’. He acknowledges that ‘although this may disappoint those who are looking for amusing stories about the cultural icon’, the collection ‘will delight those who are interested in one of the most important writers of eighteenth century Britain’. The compilation is valued by Lynch as a positive contribution to Johnsonian critical studies that should appeal th the ‘modern cultural pluralism’ of the late 1990s reader, be it ‘feminist, anti-imperialist, maybe even pro-structuralist’.⁸⁰ It is worth noting however that though much broader than previously, on the whole the critical position is tailored and modified to suit the parameters of a clearly defined ideological stand. Naturally this can prove restrictive in outcome.

Tom Keymer, for example, claims to offer a different critical approach to dealing with Johnson’s epistolary writings as compositions of rhetoric worthy of being studied in their own right.⁸¹ He argues that, ‘not content with loosening the usual styles and structures that contain the prose, Johnson uses the letter as a medium of self-parody’. And goes further to say that in doing so Johnson misdirects ‘his characteristic sagacity toward mere trivia with playful extravagance’.⁸² An extract from a letter of 31 January 1784 to Hester Thrale is quoted, with a view to comparing the peculiar similarity between Johnson’s,⁸³ in the words of Keymer, ‘fixation with ballooning’ and his ‘bloated body’. This is given as an example of Johnson’s magnificent fantasy of transcendence which lets him imagine, with fascinated horror’ the slight of ‘the earth a mile below’. And what emerges under the critic’s pen is a grotesque figure, confined in a ‘swollen earthbound body’, with a mind engaged in ‘bizarre fantasies of unshackling flight’.⁸⁴ As if shackled by the doctrine of post-Freudian psycho-analysis, Keymer over-emphasises ‘the pain of self-consciousness’ in Johnson’s letters and this precludes him from further exploring the influence of any external factors and particularly those of science. I would suggest that in the above mentioned letter to Hester Thrale, Johnson is applying his knowledge of celestial mechanics in a discussion of more mundane nature. That his keen interest in flying foes further back, one has to read his reflection on it in his Dissertation on the Art of Flying in Rasselas, written twenty years earlier. There ‘to swim’ is articulated as ‘to fly in a grosser fluid and to fly is to swim in a subtler’. The artist ‘who had contrived many engines both of use and recreation’ explains to the prince that the initial labour of rising from the ground may well require a greater effort just as it is observable ‘in the heavier domestick fowls’. The hitch is resolved eventually since ‘as we mount higher, the earth’s attraction, and the body’s gravity, will be gradually diminished, till we shall arrive at a region where the man will float in the air without any tendency to fall’.⁸⁵ At play is Newton’s law of gravitation which stipulates that ‘the most considerable phenomenon belonging to terrestrial bodies is the general action of gravitation, whereby all known bodies, in the vicinity of the earth, do tend and press towards its centre’⁸⁶. The allusion to his ‘bloated body’ then can serve as an excellent example of the way in which Johnson familiarizes principles of science in an accessible and entertaining manner. We can visualize this fundamental principle of physical nature, put across so amusingly, and at the same time sympathise with his yearning to escape the constraints of his earth-bound aching body and float weightless a mile above the earth’s atmospheric disturbance.⁸⁷ It is a formidable vision and admirable poetic application of Newton’s concept of gravity.

In 1984 Donald Greene concluded his evaluation of the body of existing critical material on Johnson written in the first three quarters of the twentieth century, by saying that there had not been a sufficient shift in the prevailing attitude to call the Macaulayan myth dead. To illustrate his point Greene referred to Mona Wilson’s negative opinion of ‘much of his [Johnson’s] writing’ for being ‘dead as well as dull’.⁸⁸ Greene’s statement that ‘this grotesque figure’ may still be around at the tercentenary of Johnson’s death, sounds like a reluctant admission of defeat, tinged with sadness. In his view, the distorted image created by Macaulay and perpetuated thereafter could be challenged only by the determined efforts of a young scholar who would be prepared to dedicate a ‘life time’s work’ to the successful rehabilitation of Johnson, the man and the writer. His appeal was passionate and sincere:

Yet I cannot help feeling that, arduous as the task

might be, such a study of Johnson’s writing and thought

would in the end be quite as rewarding as the study of

Dostoevsky or Joyce. ⁸⁹

Greene’s ideas caused ‘considerable discussion and controversy’ at the time with his insistence that ‘the picture of the age implicit in such descriptive terms simply does not fit the facts’.⁹⁰

The critic stressed that an overview of Johnson’s writings could not be accomplished without a competent understanding of the historical and intellectual milieu in which he lived and worked.⁹¹ However, in his book Samuel Johnson and the New Science of 1971, Richard Schwartz tried to offer a specific solution to the task by setting the tone for a challenging critical reappraisal of Samuel Johnson and his attitude to science.⁹² He stressed that since science was at the core of our understanding of the spirit of the age of Johnson, overlooking the way in which science and literature then interacted had resulted in a failure to achieve the desired shift in settled critical consensus. Pointing to the existing tendency of modern scholarship to encase eighteenth-century literature within clearly cut divisions, conveniently labelled ‘Augustan’, ‘Neoclassic’, ‘Age of Reason, or ‘Enlightenment’, Schwartz offered a few possible reasons for the apparently confused and uncertain critical reaction. One was the inclination of critics to ‘lump Johnson with the Restoration and eighteenth century satirists of science’ which had led to their failure to pick up his positive attitude towards the sciences of his day. Another was that eighteenth-century science was on the whole British and was viewed with admiration on the Continent. Schwartz was adamant that ‘the English tradition of science and scientific ideology - to which the empirical methodology is central’ is a fact that was self-evident to Voltaire but failed to be noticed by critics today.⁹³ In his Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopaedia of Diderot, D’Alembert declares British science the ‘world model’ and pays tribute to Newton for giving ‘philosophy a form which apparently it is to keep’; to Locke for reducing physics to what it really ought to be: the experimental physics of the soul’; and to Bacon, the ‘immortal Chancellor’, who ‘prepared from afar the light which gradually, by imperceptible degrees, would illuminate the world’. According to the great French mathematician, Bacon, Newton and Locke were towering above all those who were keen to follow the torch of truth.⁹⁴

In the third chapter of his book, The Baconian Legacy, Schwartz deals with the significance of the Baconian principles in general, with special emphasis upon ‘the form itself of induction and the judgement made thereby’.⁹⁵ Often quoting from pieces which do not lie readily in every scholar’s library, he makes his critical argument more forcefully, helping to bring to the fore the influence of Bacon’s experimental philosophy upon Johnson’s determined dislike of dogmatism.⁹⁶ The reconstructed image of Johnson is that of a man of passionate intelligence whose ‘philosophic dabbling and scientific reading are thoroughly characteristic of the age to which he gave his name’ and whose works bear ‘the stamp of genius’.⁹⁷ However, a survey of the few available reviews of Schwartz’s book shows that his hope to initiate a debate about this side of Johnson appear to have been generally frustrated. With the exception of the earlier scholarly studies of John J Brown, Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth Century Science (1943) and Stephen O Mitchel, Samuel Johnson and the New Philosophy (1961), critics remained on the whole indifferent to the importance Schwartz placed upon Johnson’s reaction to the new science and the importance of English empiricism in his methodology of cognition.⁹⁸ More importantly, praising Schwartz for ‘focusing attention on an unstudied aspect of Johnson’s thought’, Paul Korshin ended his review by endorsing the settled opinion that ‘the study of literature and science is better off in the hands of the historians of science than in those of literary critics’.⁹⁹ He failed to acknowledge what becomes apparent from Schwartz’s book - that ‘in discussing Johnson’s attitudes, we were of necessity also discussing an approach to experience, an intellectual temper or cast of mind’. Thus, learning about pertinent scientific and philosophical ideas that came to mould Johnson’s

thought could help us ‘explain or enhance our present understanding of much of his work’.¹⁰⁰ Undoubtedly, the historical perspective is an essential tool in restoring the eighteenth-century knowledge of the successive advances of science, and the extinction and resuscitation of the arts. In Johnson’s words, the ‘cogency of argument’ is a living embodiment of the thought structure of the time.

Today, with the unlimited potentials of the microchip and satellites continuously orbiting the sky, the ‘telescope’ and the ‘microscope’ have lost the luster they would have had in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is yet another indication that ideas are not fossils, but evolving organisms. They focus on the outlook of people who epitomize away of thinking – active, mobile and changing – a living embodiment of the thought of an age. This means that there cannot be a method that can serve as a standard, so to speak, of universal methodology; critical perspectives are arbitrary, more like a rainbow reminiscent of Johnson’s sceptre of criticism. And due to the advancement of the various disciplines of science today, its fragmentation into completely separate areas of research has reached irreversible proportions. Moreover, science is often being perceived by the lay person as too analytic, thus unimaginative and detached from the mode of everyday life. This fact exasperates scientists who point their fingers at education as the main reason for this. One positive step forward is that all science undergraduates should have time and stimulation to find out something about music, literature and art, and those reading the arts should come to know something about science. In this way, the reluctance of the Johnsonian scholar to enter the field of science may well be overcome.

And in order to reconstruct an image more akin to that of the real Johnson - that of a deeply human mind, attuned to the interests of his age, the Johnsonian scholar may have to enter the specialised field of history of science; and to be able to gain access to the inspiration of science in the art of Samuel Johnson, some knowledge of the fundamental concepts in the methodologies of Bacon and Newton remains no more an option. We must be aware of their models of thinking  as they transformed the whole outlook of future generations. Their philosophies are to be studied not for the sake of any definitive answers but rather for the questions they pose – they enlarge out conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and as they diminish our dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation, they bring us closer to the ‘real’ Samuel Johnson, more vibrant and complex, who truly shared the sensibilities of his Age.

Notes

17.Lord Macaulay, ‘Life of Johnson’, 42.

36.Paul Korshin, ‘Introduction’ to Robert Anderson’s Life of Samuel Johnson, first ed.1815 (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim, rept. 1973), i.

38.Anderson, Life of Samuel Johnson, 8.

42.Walter Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1978).

43.Ibid, ‘Preface’, xx.

44.Bate, Samuel Johnson, 253. See ante 41.

63. Robert De Maria, Jr., The Life of Samuel Johnson: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

67. De Maria, ‘Preface’ to The Life of Samuel Johnson, xvi

68. Suarez, Review, 416. See ante n. 64

89. Greene, ‘The Future of Johnsonian Biography’, 59. See ante 9.

91. Greene, 42.

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